The Road to Port Townsend

Port Townsend isn't far from Port Orchard, but there are three lighthouses in between and we all know the motto--"let no lighthouse go unphotographed." We're seeing a pattern in Washington lighthouses. Outside of the two near the mouth of the Columbia River, they're all built on the beach. Tides have been low this week, so it's been easy to walk around on the beachside and take pictures from the back.The first one, Point No Point, is near the small village of Hansville. As soon as we had that thought, we ran into a problem. The next lighthouse was at Skunk Bay. Yes, you read that right. I don't know why they call it that. It smelled fine to us, but the Skunk Bay Lighthouse is privately owned and operated. It looked like we were going to get skunked in our search. We thought it would be one that you would just have to photograph from a distance, but just as we were giving up and heading to the next lighthouse, you could see it sitting at the end of a path through the trees. Shadows and my aversion to trespassing compromise the quality of this shot, but here it is.The third lighthouse was potentially even more disappointing. Marrowstone Lighthouse is located at the northern tip of Marrowstone Island. It is government owned and closed to public. The beach around it is open to the public, bit when you walk to the back you find what we refer to as just a block of cement. If it weren't for the grouping of buildings behind it, it would been VERY disappointing,but I think the red rooftops constitute a near save.Maybe not--maybe you just remove the block of cement and take a picture of vintage victorian home on the beach.

On the Road to the Olympic Peninsula

We're out on our second annual trip to the Olympic Peninsula. We're planning a slow trip this year with lots of little sidetrips along the way. So far, WiFi connections have been non-existent and this one is very slow. I'll try to post daily if I can. Sometimes it may be just something on the sidebar or one picture "in the middle." I thought technology might decrease as we traveled west, but it's actually getting better. We left Thursday after Dave got off work and drove to Port Orchard for the night. We got into Port Orchard about sundown and the sunset over the bay and the Olympics was quite nice. This shot was from the parking lot of our hotel.

Father's Day Getaway

I surprised Dave with a trip to Seattle for Father’s Day. We did things a little differently than we normally do. It seems like we do the same routine everytime. We stay in the same hotel in Bellvue, go to Pikes Place Market during the day, and a Mariner’s game at night. It’s a fun trip, but for Father’s Day, we did things a little differently. We drove up to Bremerton on Friday afternoon and stayed at the Hampton by the ferry dock. We usually go to Bremerton and ride the ferry (or car boat as Rylie says) to Seattle and stay there. It was an interesting ride over because we had two armed Coast Guard zodiacs escorting our ferry all the way to Seattle. We wondered if maybe the security level was elevated, but no, they were just out for a ride.This time we walked on the ferry, walked around the pier, had dinner, and road back. It had poured rain on us on the way up and was still quite cloudy by evening, but surprisingly not incredibly windy or cold.Saturday turned out to be a gorgeous day and very spontaneous. We talked about doing several different things on the drive Friday, but it turned into a lighthouse hunt. We have been looking for the West Point Lighthouse in Seattle for at least a year and finally found it--with the help of a GPS. (I think we’d still be looking without it.) The most wonderful thing about it is that’s it’s just above the beach and the tide was out so there were no cliffs to teeter on to take pictures from the back. The clouds and sun even cooperated.We stopped in a marine store along the way and a guy helped Dave find a book he’s been looking for for years at a marine bookstore in Ballard. We were close to Ballard and so it would just be a quick detour to pick up this book—just a few minutes out of way. NOT!!! We were there for the summer solstice and all of Ballard was in pagan celebration mode. We won’t go into the details of it, but let’s just say lots of streets were closed off which nullifies any advantage you get from having a GPS and the blank space below is the only picture blogspot would allow me to post.





We did finally get to the bookstore and the “decade long” (I may be exaggerating a bit, but not much) search for the book is over.
After that it was off to Alki Point. We had tried to take pictures of the lighthouse from the ferry the night before, but it’s not very big, the ferry doesn’t come very close to the point, and a dark sky combined for disappointing shots. (I felt like I was trying to take pictures of Cape Arago again.)We went by in April and there was construction all around, but when we stopped, not only was there no construction, it was open for tours.After that, a quick drive around the point took us to the ferry dock at Fauntleroy. We rode over to Vashon Island and drove down for one last lighthouse. We had no idea that Point Robinson was on Vashon Island. There were lots of clouds coming and going to and from Seattle, but not one raindrop until we got south of Olympia on the way home. Saturday turned out to be a beautiful day for a Father’s Day getaway.

Back on the River

I know it appears as though we’ve dropped off the face of the earth, but it took a little more time to recover from a two week road trip to California than I thought. We planned to come home and start sailing, but we dropped the motor off before we left to have a little work done on it because it was running kind of rough and by the time we got it back on the boat and had a chance to go out, it was Saturday. The beginning of June was either hot with no wind or cool and cloudy with no wind. It was after Father’s Day before we got out much, but when we did it was gorgeous.There will no doubt be more river pictures as we go through the summer.